Throughout Sub-Sahara Africa, environmental pressures are acute as the degradation of natural resources threatens livelihoods and future prospects.

Resulting gaps in water management and degradation of ecosystems affects women and girls disproportionately, through time needed for fetching water, missed opportunities for education. Increasing female leadership in water-related decisions is seen as a key tool for promoting equity and sustainable resource use alike.

About the Project: WWOOC aims to promote women leadership in water-related decision making, supporting them in improving local use of water, sustainable natural resource management and public health. Activities are focusing on training for effective participation in decision making, support for sustainability entrepreneurs and development of locally relative citizen monitoring schemes with the potential to changing power relationships in resource management.

The project follows an action research philosophy, documenting and reflecting on changes in local attitudes in parallel to all activities.

The project is working with local communities in three action sites; The mara Bay and Masarori in Tanzania, the wildlife Conservation Area of the Silowana complex in Zambia and Mabamba Bay wetland in Uganda. Because all these communities depend on degrading natural resources and all have recently developed an integrated management plan in multi-stakeholder consultations that they are now challenged to implement.

The project is funded by COCA-COLA foundation through the UNESCO IHE-DELFT